I’m sure many of our US customers have already heard about the outage at Level3 yesterday, especially those of you in the midwest. We weren’t directly affected by this problem, but this kind of thing does serve to remind us that large-scale outages are possible and that should one affect our servers there might not be anything we can do but sit and wait. That’d be a nightmare for us — any outage is bad, and not being able to do anything about it is about the only thing that could make it worse!

That scenario is exactly the reason why we host our own site on a server which is separate from our customer sites (both geographically and in respect to our network provider). Should the worst happen and our customers’ sites are taken down by a widespread network outage, we should still be able to communicate with you all and keep you apprised of the situation.